David Levy Yulee

Origins and early life

David Levy Yulee was born David Levy on 12 June 1810 on the island of St Thomas, in the Danish West Indies, into a practicing Sephardi family: his father, Moses Elias Levy, was a Moroccan-born Jewish merchant who bought vast lands in Florida and dreamed of a refuge for the Jews of Europe there.

Work and career

The son took another road, and this fiche states it plainly: he married a Christian, Nancy Wickliffe, changed his name to Yulee in 1846 and raised his children in his wife's faith; he figures in this directory by his documented Jewish birth and father. A lawyer and delegate of the Florida Territory, he led the campaign for statehood and in 1845 became the first person of Jewish birth elected to the United States Senate, serving Florida there for most of the next sixteen years.

He built the Florida Railroad across the peninsula from Fernandina to Cedar Key, completed in 1861, which earned him the name Father of Florida Railroads. The rest is recorded here as history requires: a slaveholder whose plantation at Homosassa was worked by enslaved people, and an ardent secessionist who left the Senate for the Confederacy in 1861, he was imprisoned at Fort Pulaski in 1865 and pardoned. He died in New York on 10 October 1886.